HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 227say “But we couldn’t do it as well as you, Kay”. Half the time they tell me—apparently
sincerely—that I am brilliant. The other half of the time they say things like “Ooh we’re
not personnel, we couldn’t handle that” ’.
‘What’s going to happen, then?’
‘I am going to talk to Martin about it. He might as well pull me out. OK, as an experi-
enced HR person, I can solve a lot of the HR problems that come up in manufacturing.
But a lot of the time, I fear, my presence is creating as many problems as it is solving.
I’ve tried to develop these managers. But they would probably develop better if I
weren’t there—they’d bloody well have to learn for themselves, wouldn’t they. A lot
of what they have got to learn is how to treat the people who work for them as people.
The bottom line is that they’ve just got to act as nicer people. They’ve got to treat
people properly. As an HR person I can’t do that for them.’
‘And you won’t have a sense of failure if Martin does pull you out?’
‘I don’t think so. Actually, I think it’s the right thing to do. I feel, personally, that it
would be the wrong thing to do to continue.’
‘Howdoyoumean“the wrong thing”?’
By holding the hands of those manufacturing supervisors and managers I am stopping
them ever doing a good job for the business. Also—how can I put it?—I am taking
responsibility away from them. I believe in respecting people’s right to get it wrong as
well as to get it right. Let them do what they are paid to do or look elsewhere for a job.’
There is a sting in the tail of Kay’s last statement. There was a lot of emotion
involved in the situation in which she found herself. But she is introducing
various ethical criteria into the discussion. She talks of some of her personal
ethical thinking—about giving people responsibility for their actions and, it
would seem, about people fully deserving the pay they receive. Her personal
values, however, are secondary to the business ones: it is the importance of
these men’s ‘doing a good job for the business’ that is given priority. That,
however, is not the only point that emerges from this episode from the ethno-
graphic study. This situation only arose because of the coming into play of
the Weberian paradox of consequences: A formal HR presence in this part of
the factory was intended to improve the quality of day-to-day management.
The unintended consequence of its introduction was, however, to make things
worse. As Kay put it in a later conversation: ‘Everything about my going there
was right. It was right for the business and it was right for the people. But
it turned out to be wrong for the business, wrong for the staff, wrong for the
manufacturing supervisors and, yes, wrong for me.’ With the words ‘right’ and
‘wrong’, Kay is mixing together ethical principles and expedient considerations
in a way that was observed more widely in the study of the company. Generally,
the ‘principles which appeared to underpin managers thinking’ were ones
which combined ‘moral categories with pragmatic conceptions of what “will
work”—what will work in the sense of helping managers carry out the tasks for
which they are responsible’ (Watson 1996). Ethical thinking, it would appear,